The Psychoanalytic Study of Society. Vol. IV: Edited by Warner Muensterberger, Ph.D., and Sidney Axelrad, D.S.Sc. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1967. 350 pp.

Psychoanalysts will find much of interest here. Derek Freeman reviews Freud's Totem and Taboo in the light of current anthropologic and genetic knowledge. Freud attempted to explain the origins of moral reactions in terms of sequels to a great collectively perpetrated crime—patricide. He was able to picture a feasible setting for such a crime in Darwin's postulates about the 'primal horde' condition of early man. Freud insisted that the original killing of the father in the 'primal horde' situation was an actual event, and that memory of this, together with guilt about it, had been transmitted to subsequent generations for all time by 'the inheritance of psychical dispositions'. There is no evidence for a primal horde condition with a single father, and genetics has thoroughly disproved any such hereditary potentiality as Freud envisioned. Freeman finds Freud's insistence on the actuality of the primeval killing all the more interesting because Freud himself stated that fantasies of such a killing would lead to the same superego formation as he described. Such a theory would be consistent both with the main body of psychoanalytic theory and with anthropological evidence. By means of cogent observations on Freud's life and neurosis, Freeman explains Freud's adherence to actuality over fantasy.

Noel Bradley has written a rich account of gleanings from archaeology, art, myth, and literature which might be heuristically interpreted as referring to unconscious conflicts about primal scene experiences. He is especially interested in the condensed images of the copulating parents which, he feels, shape myths such as Plato's myth of the primeval men-women. Bradley also presents two excerpts from analyses in which patients alluded to this myth, both directly and by the over-all content of the hour, 'some months after' he had drafted his views of the myth. Readers will have to decide for themselves in what sense these excerpts establish or confirm assumptions about